Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change - review

Redirect provides an intelligent person's introduction to psychology, a field that gives rise to more quackery and charlatanism than almost any other. That alone makes it worth reading. The fact that it is accessible, engaging and consistently WTF-worthy makes it an instant classic of popular science - and its lessons could scarcely be more timely.

Timothy D Wilson, an American who literally wrote the textbook on social psychology, has a scientist's pernicketiness about evidence-based research but a writer's gift for distilling its latest findings into everyday language. His lessons range from the inefficacy of post-traumatic talking therapies to the idiocies of "self help" - but the binding theme is narratives. The key insight is that the stories we tell, and are told, about ourselves are our single most important psychological motivator.

As a simple example, if you tell a child how helpful they are, they begin to shape a story of themselves as helpful and act accordingly. The same is true of adults. When people join a voluntary organisation, it has beneficial effects on their behaviour outside the organisation too. They think: "I guess I'm just a helpful guy" - so when they are confronted with a harassed mother and a heavy pushchair at the Earl's Court interchange, they are more likely to help them up the stairs.

It sounds simple, but the implications for how we teach different genders (is it such a good idea to identify girls as diligent and boys as problematic?), and deal with problems, including teen pregnancy and racial prejudice, are profound.The most eye-catching chapter centres on teenage violence: once you have digested it, it is hard to remain sanguine about the kneejerk response to the recent riots.

Wilson cites the case of a junior league football coach in Oakland, California, who despaired of losing his players to gang violence. He set up a scheme that he hoped would frighten them into being good, taking them on horrifying trips to jails, morgues and funeral parlours so they could see the effects of bullet wounds and prison rape first hand. Common sense, right?

Only when the long-term effects of the "scared straight" scheme were finally measured, the results were surprising. Every study proved the scheme to be worse than useless: those who had been through this process were actually 13 per cent more likely to join a gang. Wilson cheerfully does the maths and calculates that 6,500 kids have committed crimes they wouldn't have done because of this "common sense" approach.Why? First, the boys were put together in their peer groups, so the best were exposed to the worst. Second, the narrative that the scheme gave the boys stuck with them. They were implicitly told: "We think you're at risk of joining a gang" - so even those who had never dreamed of joining a gang began to think "I guess I'm the sort of person who ends up in a gang". The external motivation undermined their internal motivation. Mentoring programmes and voluntary work, which "redirect" these narratives, are far more effective, he concludes.

Regular Evening Standard readers may now be recalling our recent front-page story in which the Government's radical, "common sense" response to the riots was spelled out. "Anti-gang lessons for pupils aged nine Children as young as nine will get shock lessons in the horrific consequences of knife-crime police and surgeons to visit problem schools." As I said, a timely book.